But think how large of a job program that would have been.

Hundreds of people manually writing assembly and paid middle class wages. Not a compiler in sight.

In the years leading up to the singularity I’d expect to see a lot of Graeberian “Bullshit Jobs”.

Everyone knows they’re BS but as a society we allow them because we aren’t willing to implement socialism or UBI.

There's no reason to believe that we'll need another 50x more developers, though.

There isn't? I feel like there's still a ton of places software hasn't even touched and not because it doesn't make sense, but because no one's gotten to it. It's not the most profitable thing people could write software for.

Even if not, the original claim was that we may see a 50X decrease and I personally don't think that is likely, pre-Singularity anyway :)